How to Merchandise Your Artist Store for the Holidays

By Amy Schroeder

Now that you can curate your Minted Artist Store using Merchandising Tools to shape the look and feel of your artist brand, developing a merchandising plan is one of the first priorities to help you prepare for the Minted.com 2015 holiday sales season.

First Things First: Organize Your Tabs

If you already have a great number of holiday card designs and other holiday-themed products in your Store, we recommend organizing them into a “Holiday” section, and moving that section tab to the far left, just after your Home section (learn how in this FAQ). If you have a large assortment of products that make for great gifts, you may want to create a separate section tab called “Holiday Gifts.”

Merchandising Your Featured Products and Sections

Merchandising varies for every Minted artist, and we recommend identifying a manageable number of key products that you want to promote most. Your Featured Products could be a combination of your top-selling products (or top-voted new products) and particularly unique designs that make a statement about you as an artist.

If you don’t have any Design Challenge–winning holiday cards, you may want to self-launch non-custom cards. (Learn more about self-launch products in Minted Designer FAQs, and remember that all self-launch products are non-customizable by customers.) If you have dozens of holiday-themed designs and cards or a series of giftable products, position your best eight products at the very top of your Holiday section.

To help you create your merchandising plan for the holiday shopping season, Minted’s merchandising leaders share their insights and predictions for the 2015 holiday season.

Hot in Holiday Cards: Traditional Reds and Nontraditional Greetings

Get ready to show your cards. The prime sales season for holiday cards begins the last week of October and starts to peak the week of Black Friday (November 27) and Cyber Monday (November 30), followed by a decline in mid-December, says Rose Shattuck, General Manager of Minted Stationery.

Recommended Holiday Cards to Spotlight in Minted Artist Stores

Custom is king. Customizable (challenge-winning) holiday cards will be in highest demand. Customers want to upload their own photo, family name, annual letter, and more. You should also feel free to self-launch and promote non-customizable non-photo holiday cards with genericized greetings for the customer who wants something simple and beautiful without spending any time on customization.

Red-y for the holidays. We find that many Minted customers gravitate toward holiday cards with red hues. That is, unless they’re shopping for Hanukkah cards or corporate holiday cards, in which case blues or neutrals are better.

Spice up the season’s greetings. Customers love holiday cards featuring unique messages, so we recommend featuring original takes on the standard “Happy Holidays” and “Merry Christmas.”

Just about all styles are equal. No one holiday card style sells better than another. “Minted customers enjoy the full range of styles from traditional/classic, to whimsical, to modern, and edgy,” Rose says.

Minted’s Top 6 Most Giftable Holiday Products

Minted Art and Custom Art. “Art in which customers upload their own photos is an extremely popular gift during the holiday season,” says Ashley Ganz, Director of Merchandising for Holiday and Gifts. (Download the self-launch art print template here.)

Personal stationery—especially foil-pressed. “Foil is always a top seller, so if you have a foil-pressed design in your Store, we recommend featuring it at the top,” Ashley says. (Download self-launch stationery templates here.)

Wedding products. “Don’t forget about wedding,” Ashley says. “The holiday season is the most popular time of year to get engaged, and Google searches for ‘save the dates’ spike the first week of December.” If you have a number of weddings products, you may want to position wedding products up high in your Home section or create a Weddings section.

This is the first article in our 2015 Minted Holiday Playbook, a one-month program designed to teach artists how to better merchandise, market, sell their work. The next article will be published on in the Community>Resources section of Julep on October 6.